Breeding Unicorns: Developing Trustworthy and Scalable Randomness Beacons

Breeding Unicorns: Developing Trustworthy and Scalable Randomness Beacons

Abstract

Randomness beacons are services that periodically emit a random number, allowing users to base decisions on the same random value without trusting anyone: ideally, the randomness beacon does not only produce unpredictable values, but is also of low computational complexity for the users, bias-resistant and publicly verifiable. Such randomness beacons can serve as an important primitive for smart contracts in a variety of contexts. This paper first presents a structured security analysis, based on which we then design, implement, and evaluate a trustworthy and efficient randomness beacon. Our approach does not require users to register or run any computationally intensive operations. We then compare different implementation and deployment options on distributed ledgers, and report on an Ethereum smart contract-based lottery using our beacon.

Grafik Top
Authors
  • Dharanikota, Samvid
  • Jensen, Michael
  • Kristensen, Sebastian Rom
  • Michno, Matthias Sass
  • Pignolet, Yvonne-Anne
  • Hansen, Rene Rydhof
  • Schmid, Stefan
Grafik Top
Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Journal Paper
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Informatik Allgemeines
Journal or Publication Title
PLoS ONE
ISSN
1932-6203
Date
2020
Export
Grafik Top